Kristof Picks Missouri Grad Student For Traveling Companion

New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof announced the winner of his travel contest yesterday, selecting University of Missouri journalism grad student Casey Parks. “We’ll most likely start in Equatorial Guinea, bounce over to Cameroon and travel through a jungle with Pygmy villages to end up in the Central African Republic—one of the most neglected countries in the world,” Kristof writes (the story is available to TimesSelect subscribers only). “We’ll visit schools, clinics and aid programs, probably traveling in September for 10 days.” Kristof, as we previously mentioned, conducted the contest to help draw more attention—and perhaps aid—to some heartbreaking region of the world and give a young writer a break.

The Times published Parks’s essay yesterday, and in it she reveals that she never even saw an airplane until her senior year in high school.

The electricity that comes from crafting seeing the way journalists do—cataloguing every movement, sound, feeling, inference—is what continues to spark me. And by no means have I exhausted the stories that are to be done in America (or even Columbia, MO, in all its quaintness). I so desperately want to leave this country and know more. I’ve never thought of myself as provincial, but this year, reading on the tension between the two Koreas, swallowing Rushdie’s Pakistan and India, inhaling the French riots, I realize how insular my life has been. My tour of the Southern states has left me unable to fully discern what lies beyond.

But I want to.

I want to learn by seeing. I feel deeply, and I know journalism. I’m strong, and have no need for 5-star hotels or other luxuries. In person, I’m charming and sweet and considerate, but still bold and fearless. The trip you’re offering is an experience that should merge experience and inexperience, skill and desire for more. I have these qualities.

Casey will blog about her experience for the Times and MTVu.

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